


Power, Kingdom, Power

by MellytheHun



Series: The Deadlights Zine Series [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, First Kiss, Friendship, Friendship is Magic, Love, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Meta, Minor Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Minor Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Pining, Prophetic Visions, Soulmates, Young Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25687057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MellytheHun/pseuds/MellytheHun
Summary: Beverly, all-seeing in the Deadlights.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh
Series: The Deadlights Zine Series [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1862683
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	Power, Kingdom, Power

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE READ THE TRIGGER WARNINGS
> 
> TW: death scenarios, violence, implied child abuse, drowning, childhood trauma, sexualization of a child, generalized experiences of misogyny, mentions of blood, implied and explicit suicide, mentions of murder, accidental deaths, grief, abusive relationships
> 
> Note: if anyone comments bullshit abt misandry or something, i'll delete your comment. What's written are my own, personal experiences, it's real, it happens to a lot of femme people, and idc if Not All Men blah blah blah pls use common sense if/when commenting thank u
> 
> Title inspired by 'Sinnerman,' by Nina Simone

**Beverly**

Sometime, back when she was very young, and not yet brave enough to tell bullies just to fuck off, a teenaged neighbor boy thought it would be funny to tell Beverly about all the different ways she might die. 

In her experience, boys had always been this way around her - grotesque, morbid, and in want to make her uncomfortable.

He said that gunshot wounds weren't like how they looked in the movies and TV shows; that the bullets could ricochet in the body, tear up organs, and break bones, or implode like a bomb on the inside. He talked about the struggle of drowning, how her body would fight it the entire time, how it would burn all over while her body seized, and eventually her starving lungs would instinctively gulp down the water. He talked about being mortally wounded by a blow to the head, and falling asleep either from the impact, or from the blood loss, and never waking up again. He talked about how blood congeals in the body when it’s mixed with certain venoms, how thick, and fatty it becomes, how her body would look like one big, sore, bruise, and how other ones made people bleed out of every orifice. 

The more visibly uncomfortable she became, the more entertained he seemed.

Until Bill, and the Losers, Beverly had been rather certain that all boys were just innately cruel. It felt as though she was always fighting men off her in some way or another. 

From the moment men saw her curled lashes, and ruby lips, they groomed her like a house pet, or they sought to make her too fearful to fend them off. They would invade her personal space, touching her hair, her shoulders, her waist, all without permission; men would plant her on their laps, jiggle their legs up and down so she'd bounce, so it would seem harmless, and fun, but it wasn't. She didn't like it. She didn't like being passed around like a conversation piece left on the living room table, meant to be at all times entertaining, tolerant, pretty, and quiet.

In the early days, boys would pull on her hair, or push her in puddles, and later on, they'd snap her bra straps so they'd burn her skin, and they'd hold eye-contact with her while they grabbed at their crotches, and they would laugh. They'd laugh, like it was all in good fun, and every time she cried, and every time she told someone trusted that she wasn't comfortable, or she wasn't happy, or she didn't feel safe, they'd tell her, 'boys will be boys,' or 'they're just flirting with you,' or 'you should take it as a compliment,' or 'boys mature later than girls,' constantly excusing them. 

And this neighbor boy - he was no different. Maybe he wanted to touch her, maybe he wanted to force himself on her, and to restrain himself from physically attacking her, he had to turn to emotional battery instead. Maybe he was such an animal, such an undignified, malicious thing that if he couldn't meet his physical desires, he would punish her for it, whether he consciously understood what he was doing, or not. So, he'd make her squirm, one way or another.

She remembers trying to ignore him, being too polite, too well-trained to sit still, and look pretty to know that storming away was an option, and because she stayed put, she remembers it all.

One of the invasively memorable suggestions he made was hypothermia.

She remembers how he said, “you’ll feel really cold, colder than you know your body can even get - it'll be so cold that it kinda burns, like dry ice, all frozen needles and stuff all over your body, but that’s good. It’s once you start feeling warm that you’re in real trouble.”

When the Deadlights first hit her, they’re cold, and she’s cold, and she feels covered in slime, her skin is chilly, and wet, but at the same time dusty, cracked, and dry. 

And she’s warm now.

And she thinks that’s probably bad.

She sees her friends standing in a circle, she sees them from a bird’s eye view, she sees herself, handprints all over her, and she hears herself saying “run towards something,” and Something Else, something Other, says back to her, “ _I won’t let you get far, little Beverly. I won't let any of you get far, but run as fast as you please_.”

Mike grows up broad, strong, and tall; he finishes his GED, he gets into good colleges, the promise of scholarships are ahead too, but then his grandfather passes, leaving him the farm, and he stays. He stays there in Derry, even though Derry wants him dead, and always has. He stays longer than he means to. He stays even longer than that, because he soon realizes he is the only one of the Losers who remembers It. That once people move away from Derry, they forget what they've seen, what they've experienced, even who they are. But, because Mike never leaves, he never forgets. He is forgotten, though.

There's an ember in his chest, burning up for Bill - Bill forgetting him hurts the most, but he allows it to happen, because he wants Bill to be free from Derry, the way he can't be. He loves Bill, he knows he loves Bill young, and, though he tries, he finds that he can't love like that again. Bill is his hero, and his equal at the same time; he protected Bill, and Bill protected him, and Mike thinks they'd have been happy together.

He watches Bill from far away, for all his life, but he never leaves Derry to go claim his life with Bill, because he feels someone has to stand guard. Someone must be the Witness. Someone must keep track of the children that go missing, the adults that seem to walk right out of their own lives, the residents that remember a clown in the late 80's, the odd remains found scattered, left unidentified. He stands witness over every John and Jane Doe that turns up in Derry, or vanishes for no discernible reason, the properties left abandoned. He collects evidence, he listens to police radio channels, he interviews townspeople, he follows investigators, he makes a gallery of loss, and murder, and he studies it over, and over, trying to find a way to kill It, maybe by himself, so he can see the world. So he can get out, run towards something. So that he can step into the sunlight, someday, and be free.

Running out of options, he seeks help from native folks, just outside the boundaries of Derry, and he finds he cannot defeat It alone, but the promise of seeing Bill again heartens him. Bill is the first he finds again, and they're all grown up. He loves Bill so much, he loves them all so much, he binds them all, he calls upon them all to stand guard with him, to be Witness, and their bloods stir, and steam, and he suffers. They all suffer.

Some of them run away, toward anything but Derry, leaving him with empty hands.

In the night, in what looks like a library, he is murdered at forty years old by someone who looks like Bowers, but Beverly just can't be sure - it's fuzzy, and happens very fast.

She can't see what happens to the rest of them. All she knows is that when Mike is killed, he has no family to speak of, no one to remember him, no one to witness him. He leaves no trace, he never knows unfiltered sunlight, an unburdened mind, and his heart is heavy, heavy, heavy until its very last beat.

Stanley all but sprints out of Derry when the opportunity arises, and he forgets the anguish, the fear, and the good bits too - he forgets the Losers, the sunshine, the laughter, and bike races, the quarry, and that time Richie snorted pixie sticks to see if he'd get a different type of sugar high, and he just wound up vomiting it all up on the sidewalk like a phlegmy rainbow, and Stan gagged, but then laughed so hard his knees gave out. He forgets.

His legs wind out long, his frame remains modest, his eyes, and nose, lips, and hair all stay the same, but he stretches out, grows up, he winds up wearing glasses from straining his eyes too many years, reading ornithology books with a flashlight under his bed covers, and he looks a lot like his mother. He goes to a very good school, somewhere warm, and quaint, and he meets a lovely woman there.

They love each other almost instantly, they dance often, they do puzzles together, they marry on a sunny day, somewhere really beautiful, surrounded by family, and friends, and there are colorful flowers everywhere.

He works in accounting, he’s good at what he does, and he likes the busy work; his coworkers are polite, and generous, neighborly, and routine suits him well. He balances checkbooks, and his wife steals his cardigan sweaters so often that they become communal, they take holidays together, always somewhere at least semi-tropical, and they make one another laugh. They're so happy, and they want more happiness, they want to cultivate goodness, and calm, and they want to have babies.

Ready, and excited to have babies with his beautiful wife, Stan moves them into an upscale home somewhere that's very green, where slim streets are lined with fancy cars, and they're far enough from the city to enjoy the quiet, but close enough too that they can go out for long nights on the town together when the mood strikes. The home remains devoid of children, though. They try, and they try, and his parents wonder when they'll have grandchildren, and people give them unwelcome, unsolicited advice, and he doesn't understand why he can't give the woman he loves this one thing she wants so badly, and after so long, they stop trying.

His parents die, he buries them, and he gets the sense that every second of happiness he has with his wife is borrowed time, that something is chasing his heels, closing in tight in the latest hours of the evening, but their love for each other is enough to keep them happy. They are happy, and it keeps unknown monsters at bay.

It takes time, but he makes peace with what he has, and has not accomplished, what he can, and cannot do, what he could, and could not make, but someone speaks into his ear one night. Someone whispers poison right into his ear, and it spills over his mind, drenching his brain in sickness, in fear, he shakes, he trembles like an Earthquake.

He kills himself when he is nearly forty-one, in the porcelain tub of a master bathroom. 

Beverly can't see exactly why he does it, but she knows that he is scared when he does it, and that his fear is so much bigger than his happiness, so immediately, that he leaps into his last sleep, too frightened to consider regretting it. It's so cruel to leave his wife this way, but the fear is so much stronger, it's so powerful, it mutes the rest of the world, all of his memories, and all of his life. It eclipses him, completely, and he succumbs to it, pale, and quivering.

Eddie leaves Derry, but he's hesitant to. He doesn't like change, he doesn't like the unknown, and leaving his mother in Derry proves to be remarkably difficult for him, especially with how she clings to him, and begs him to stay.

He can't see a future in Derry, though, and something has left him feeling robbed, and empty inside, similar to the way Mike felt when Bill forgot him, but it's as if Eddie can't remember who it is that punched that hole through his chest, leaving him bleeding, and aching, and wanting.

Maybe he leaves Derry, in part, to find that person, or maybe his want for a diverse, dynamic education and career is really enough. Either way, he leaves, no matter how difficult, and as soon as he steps onto his college campus, Derry, his childhood, his friends, all of it is far, far behind him, foggy and indistinct at the best, and completely absent at worst. But one thing remains the same.

He seeks out his mother in every person he meets.

The more demanding and cruel they are, the more inexplicably drawn to them he is; the more they doubt him, the more they think him weak, and small, and in need of a personal aid, the more he respects them. He spends time with people in his age group, but he doesn't call them his friends - he can't get close to any of them, and none of them think there's anymore to him than hypochondria, and lack of a spinal cord.

He sees too many doctors, he takes too many medications he doesn’t need, sometimes strong ones, addictive ones, ones that make his hands visibly shake if he goes too long without, and he tells himself it’s helpful. He tells himself it's good, that this is all fine, and there's a hole in his chest, it's still gaping, and dark, and sad, and he misses something that's like all the pink Starbursts out of the pack being gifted to him from a calloused hand, and a familiar guitar riff he thinks he only ever heard in a dream.

Sometimes, when the emptiness, and the pain get to be so much that even his many benzodiazepines can't numb it away, he thinks he's in the wrong dimension. He thinks that, somewhere along the line, he stumbled through some sort of window, or _Twilight Zone_ type door into another time, took his former self's life, and is wandering around in his shoes, being average, and sad, and alone, all while someone, somewhere else, in another patch of spacetime mourns him, hurts for him the same, has fingers sticky with sugar, and a cassette player on their boombox.

But no otherworldly portals open to him, no voices come in the night, telling him to follow simple instructions, and that if he fulfills his duties, he'll find his way home, back to who he's meant to be, back to where he's missed the most.

Eddie's a reasonable man, and he eventually talks himself down from his saccharine, and wishful ponderings. He just needs some grounding - that's what his mother tells him - he needs something to make him recognize how good his life is, that's what she says. He doesn't know what it is to disagree with her, so he tries practicing more gratitude, and he starts working an office job that exacerbates his anxiety, but he's grateful - he apologizes, and thanks everyone too often.

He finds a woman the spitting image of his mother, he's thankful, and she doesn't want a romantic partner, not really, she wants to bolt him down to the floor, and force-feed him what she thinks love is, she wants to organize his pills for him, arrange his doctor appointments, but sleep in a separate bedroom, just display him like a good deed she was awarded for, and he's fine with that, he's thankful, because he doesn't want a partnership either. Not really. Not with her. But he does want something familiar back, something he's skilled in navigating, a Devil he knows, and he's thankful, he's a thankful, grateful man, and so he marries her. That's the thing to do, so he does it.

Their years spent together are odd, borderless, somehow too close, and at the same time, cold, and far from each other. Sometimes they are friends, and sometimes they hate each other so much it's tangible in the air. In the beginning of their union, he considers leaving, trying some other way, being some other way, but then his mother dies, and he's too frightened to face the world alone.

So, he apologizes without prompting for things he's unsure he really did, he allows her to shift focus from him, to her, no matter the context, he wants to run - run away, back to start. He can't, though, and even if he could turn back time, he wouldn't, because he's grateful, he wants her to know that he's thankful for all he has, that he's not dreaming of another world, and another life, where he's another person (he is, but he shouldn't, because that's not good, or kind, or rational of him). He thanks her for the way she's overbearing, he thanks her every time she hurts him, because he knows she means well, that she's taking care of him, and he's patient, and he's cautious, and he's mindful, and he sleeps alone at night, and doesn't think about the emptiness in his chest, or the occasional, sharp pain he gets in his right forearm. 

He dies alone, asleep in an armchair, after mixing too many mood stabilizers with scotch one night - or, no - he's hurt. He's hurt, he's coughing up blood, there's flashing lights, and muttering - or, no, no, there's just his widow, soaking up the admiration of their shared social circle as they all tell her what an Angel she has been all these years, for taking care of him, considering all his afflictions. Beverly isn't sure which is true - both outcomes seem right, somehow, even in how terrible, and wrong they feel too.

Bill leaves Derry with his parents, a young teenager, and he forgets. Bill forgets Georgie, the Losers, Derry. He forgets everything but the terror. He writes it, over, and over, his spirit won’t rest, trying to get out the truth, the memories - “ _oh-hoooo, he bangs his fists against the p-p-p-posts and still insists he sees the g-g-g-ghosts!” -_ all these grown-up's love his 'old soul,' they all think he's so charmingly mature for his age, and no one ever wonders why. 

He keeps writing, he makes friends with anyone that wants to be his friend, but he floats in and out of interest with folks, never forming particularly strong bonds, which leaves him feeling depleted and lonely. His parents tell him that it's simply part of growing up - that it's harder to make friends as an adult, something about adulthood is inherently lonely, and Bill just accepts that, and carries on; his life, his relationships all casual, and fair weather, and lacking. He thinks he once had a very good friend - maybe more than one, but he can't remember them. He thinks maybe he made up the memory of a childhood friend, just to feel less lonely in his mind. He makes more things up, things that feel like memories, but aren't, or can't be, which is fine, because people like it when he makes things up.

People applaud his somber, dark poetry, and Lovecraftian prose, they all love his make-believe, scary stories - right up until the ends. He can’t seem to stick the landings, no matter how he changes his formulas, no matter how many twists he makes, or edits out, no matter how the hero fairs by the final act, but then, he doesn't know how he will fair. If he even is fairing.

He doesn’t know if the terror actually has an end, so he can’t write it. He can’t imagine it.

Despite the foggy, false memories telling him he once had all he ever could want (and with it, a vague, nagging feeling that he could have it all again if he could just _remember_ something), and disregarding the ghostly figures in his dreams that cast long shadows, he tries to fulfill himself with fiction. Or, he tells himself it's fiction. 

After he graduates, he has an editor, and he quickly finds himself with a beautiful wife that looks very much like Beverly, but Bill doesn't know that, he doesn't remember Beverly, he can't tell, but in some way, she imprinted on him in childhood. It's not always love, either. There's a false memory/ghostly dream of a girl he needs to save, a girl in danger, a girl he's kissed very gently, all of three times, and he wants to protect her from evil people, and evil monsters, the real ones, and the ones he makes up, and whoever that memory-dream-ghost-girl is, he sees her in the woman he chooses to marry. Maybe he marries her in an effort to save someone else. If a marriage can be casual, theirs is, and while they make for good friends, they both finds themselves coming up just a little too short of love.

Bill's parents tell him that's just part of growing up - settling. So, he settles. He writes, he publishes, he laments mixed reviews, wondering why nothing ever just lands perfectly correctly, but it's fine. It's fine, because when his parents die, they die thinking of him as a 'success.' They tell him he's successful because his books are published in multiple languages, and available all over the world, and there are movies and shows based on his books, and when he buries his parents, he wonders if they loved him very much, or if emotionally retiring from one's children was just something grown-up's did.

Soon after his parents pass, someone with a grey beard makes a show, or a movie out of one of his books, and he’s killed on set, at forty years old. A freak accident, a light fixture breaking, and tumbling down on him. He leaves behind a legacy with an ending that leaves people scratching their heads, and quickly forgetting him.

Ben doesn't want to leave Derry when he does, but he has little choice in the matter. Derry is the only place he ever made lasting friendships before, and he hates to leave what remains of the Losers there, but his mother takes him away, remarrying into the military again, and so he travels.

They rarely stay anywhere long enough for Ben to make any meaningful connections, Derry quickly vanishes into the collection of indistinct memories of Towns He's Lived In, and as he grows up, he imagines that he doesn't recall most of middle school because he had just lost his father - that he must have blocked the years, for being so hard on him. He doesn't find it odd that there are holes punched in his memories, he accepts that it must be an unspoken aspect of his transitory life.

His life becomes such a project of motion, in fact, he purges his room of what he can't easily throw into a backpack, he takes up less space that way, he takes up less time that way - he minimizes himself the way he thinks his mother wants him to, and he endures.

He endures his mother’s grief, his father’s absence, his step-father's disinterest, the incessant bullying that follows him from school to school, and town to town, and eventually he caves to it. He minimizes all of his life, not just his room, but his dinner plates, his waistline, his shirt sizes, he chases vanity, and he obtains it. He becomes conventionally very handsome and fit, and he also becomes a remarkably successful architect, but he struggles to trust anyone. In opening his own firm, he doesn't take on a partner.

He tries to build things that last, places of community, and togetherness, places he could never know, places he wished he had as a kid, and he tries to share himself with others, but by the time he wants that, there's barely anything left.

It's as though he turned the dials so far down on all that he ever was, he can't remember what it was like to laugh so loudly, he can't hear himself snorting, he can't remember singing Billy Idol's ' _White Wedding,_ ' at the top of his lungs alongside Richie, and Beverly, as all of the Losers cruised Magnolia Court. He can't remember who he was when he was the most of himself, when his appetite for love, and life, and knowledge, and ice cream never wavered, or bent to anyone else's commands or comforts. He can't remember living unapologetically.

He wonders if he was ever really anyone. He thinks, maybe, he never was anyone. That he was always an anonymous blob that shifted from place to place, taking up less, and less space, and less, and less time, because being himself, being Big Ben, someone with a big laugh, and a big body, and a big heart - it was too much. No one wanted that. He doesn't remember any of the Ben from Before, the Ben that Beverly knows.

Through the years, he knows he misses someone terribly, but he doesn’t remember who, same as Eddie, with the same sort of tender ache with which Mike misses Bill, and he might have known who it is he misses, if he'd kept any photos from his childhood, but he burned them all after losing a substantial amount of weight.

After his family's third move in as many years, he rid himself of all memorabilia - after all, it was just evidence of all the towns he'd swept through, hardly being noticed, or missed, if he was at all, and the less he had to carry from house to house, the better off he was when he and his family would inevitably move again. Before tossing one yearbook, though, he tore out a single signature. He doesn't remember the girl that wrote it - by the time he thinks to even check the yearbook, it's in a fire.

He likes to think she missed him, maybe. Whoever she was. Maybe she was just a very polite classmate from his pixelated history of moving, but it made him feel like he'd been seen - at least, once. A name is light enough to carry, small enough to fit in his wallet, so he can keep her, and he does keep her, and during late, lonely hours, he wonders if she misses him. 

The years press on, he finds himself alone too much, but only because he wants a certain, specific company he can’t seem to find, he still misses someone he doesn't know. He’s never happy with himself, not with the inside, or the outside, and he's a good engineer, he is good at making homes for other people, making places to bond, to make roots - for other folks, but he can't give it to himself. He can't make it happen for himself. His life is so quiet, and so lonesome. His own home is isolated, and so devoid of personality, so painfully minimalist, it looks like a model home.

He dies at forty, visiting one of his sites still under construction, during a sleepless night. His workers know he has a habit of going to the sites when the solitude of his life won't let him rest, it's not too uncommon a thing for him to do, but as he does, one fateful night, he takes a terrible fall, impaling himself on exposed rebar.

He bleeds out, alone. No one finds him til morning. He has no one to remember him, and without his vision to direct his final projects, nothing he makes in his life lasts beyond him the way he hoped they would. 

Richie makes use of that big brain of his, gets himself a full scholarship somewhere very posh, and leaves Derry and all its memories way behind him; he's excited to meet the world outside Derry, and he's excited for the world to meet _him_. Most of the Losers are gone from Derry by that point, and so he doesn't feel anything tugging him backward. Nothing to hold him back. He may be one of the last to leave, and he might even be resentful of the others for leaving Mike and him behind. He promises Mike he'll write, he'll call - the same promises they all make, leaving Derry, but forget as soon as they're outside the county line.

With nothing left to do but flourish in the theatrical, and boyishly charming way he does all things, Richie studies linguistics, philosophy, astronomy, neuroscience, molecular ontology, political science, he touches every corner of academia, and he's quite good at all of it, skilled without needing to try very hard, but bored very easily. Even with the mind of a world-changing doctor, or scientist, Richie finds that absolutely nothing brings him joy like making other people laugh.

Nothing can keep his interest like making other people smile, and giggle, and he gets better at it as he gets older; his imitations become much more refined, and sharpened to fine points by his mid-twenties, he plays piano, and guitar, he sings parody songs, he's a fast-rising star. He could be a television personality, or radio show-host, but what he wants is to be on a stage, his name in lights, telling stories, and jokes to people sat before him, so he can soak up their glee, see their grins up close.

He does amateur stand-up for a while, he's 'discovered,' by an agent, and while he's signed, he's quickly told he can’t make it on his own, that his writing bounces too much between being too juvenile, and too existentially dreadful - some agency gives him a ghost writer. He thinks it will be good enough - it will be fine. He thinks he'll be happy enough with that, because it's sort of close to what he wanted, while still not being what he wanted at all, but he thinks that, perhaps with time, he'll write a set good enough that the ghost writer will become obsolete. He thinks that maybe, in time, he can prove himself.

Time grates at him, though. Time convinces him that he was never talented to begin with, that he can't do the thing he loves most, because that's how the universe works, and always has - that he's very good at everything he doesn't want, and awful at the one thing he really does want.

Richie wants, he wants desperately, and he's lonesome down to the marrow in his bones, but he doesn't keep company. Not serious company, anyway.

Dating isn't something Richie does - he makes out with people at secluded parties sometimes, people's whose faces he forgets in daylight; he throws pills down his throat, he smokes questionable things, snorts even worse things, smiling on cue, hitting his marks, saying his lines, he tells someone else’s jokes, and they all laugh. He's a marionette, sat on the knee of some unseen writer, the jokes aren't things he wants his mother to hear, he picks up a lot of 'wasted potential,' and 'really wished you'd stuck with [insert past hobby/interest here],' and 'well, it's a living.'

He isn't sure that he's living, all the time. He sometimes has a hard time deciphering reality from nightmares, but he can't remember his nightmares, and he finds he can't remember most days of his life either. Like his own life is so bored with him that it's not taking any opportunity to align with him, or notice him even with a sidelong glance as it marches by. It's all undefined, all so softly blended, he can't tell who he is, or what he wants, what his organic thoughts are, or what he's read in a book, or been paid to say. 

He's surrounded by laughter, but he's miserable, surrounded by people who say they like them, some say they love him, but they don't know him, and he knows that because _he_ doesn't know him, so how could anyone else - and even if he did know himself, and even if someone else truly knew him, he didn't love any of them back. What he does know about himself, he doesn't care for, and he rather wishes he didn't know at all.

He keeps secrets. He doubts himself. He hates himself. He misses someone the same way Ben does, the same way Eddie does, the same way Mike misses Bill, he's got the same non-memory of some Important Someone somewhere out there haunts him like a ghost, spreads like a cancer from his heart out to the tips of his fingers and toes, makes him ache everywhere. He spends a lot of time fending off admirers; he sometimes tells people he'd a widower. Which is a lie. He doesn't know why he does it, why he lies about it, but it sometimes feels like the truth to him. Other days, he says what he thinks is the closest to the truth, which is, "I'm sorry, but I'm already in love with someone else."

He doesn't know who, but maybe that's true enough, and that's his entire life - 'enough.' It's just good 'enough,' it's bearable, he scrapes by on happiness, he wouldn't recognize it if it were laughing in his face at a joke someone else wrote, but he tells himself it's enough, because acknowledging that none of his life had been enough by miles, and miles, would destroy him in a way he doesn't think he can recover from. So, it's enough. It has to be.

One rainy day, someone threatens to expose something secret about him to the world, but Beverly can't see what it is, though she can sense that it's a secret Richie has kept for nearly all his life. It's a secret he's keeping now. The walls close in on him, he wants to escape, he panics, he has no one to go to for help.

He's forty-one when he hangs himself from a beam in an apartment he never furnishes, and never shares. No one finds him until neighbors complain about a terrible smell coming from his unit a few days afterward, and he leaves a note that says only 'I don't know. Ask my writer for something.'

And Beverly.

It comes all in what feels like a single flash.

She sees her aunt's dining room table with cousins sat, happy faces, full bellies, her father nowhere to be seen; she sees neighbors, and fair-weather friends come and go through school, she sees what she thinks is a college in New York City, and a man too like her father.

She sees her success, her fashion line, she sees her beauty so like that of her late mother's in her mirrors, her own half-hearted attempts at assembling happiness with ~~her father~~ this man, this man she marries. She thinks she marries him - they wear rings, she thinks about Eddie and his wife, the substitute mother implanted in his life because he'd rather a Devil he knows than face the world alone, and she knows what's she's done now, who she's married, and why, and she shudders - this man, he takes care of her. That's what he tells her.

He tells her so much, the voice in her head becomes more his, than hers. He tells her so many things, it's hard to remember how she even thought before she met him. He tells her that he loves her, and that's why he's always hounding her on her phone, why he's always questioning who she's with, why he doesn't trust her family, doesn't trust her friends, why he controls their finances, and how she shouldn't complain, because he funds her career (because he loves her), and how she shouldn't be bothered by his incessant presence (because he loves her) unless she has something to hide, he accuses her of lying constantly (he just wants open communication between them, and he has baggage - it's what he tells her), of having affairs (he's been burned before, he tells her that it's not about her, that it's about his own insecurity, and he tells her that if she loves him like he loves her, she'll accommodate his fears), he reminds her that he owns her (bits of jewelry cover her vanity, her fingers, neck, and wrists, like flags posted all over her body - big, red flags), he possesses her (he tells her that she is his, as though she is a thing that can be owned and kept, but he tells her that with love, all with love), the car she drives is under his name (he tells her he's doing her a favor, he loves her, it's a gift), no one would know her work or her name if it weren't for him (he loves her work, he loves her name, though he loves it better with his surname attached to it, but she was no one when they met - that's what he says, is that she was no one until he loved her).

She believes him.

He wants her to be grateful, and she is, but he insists that she would behave differently if that were true, no matter how her behavior changes, it never suits his needs. There is no form she can take that he considers grateful enough.

He wants her to be subdued, she's too friendly, she's too gregarious, she's too driven, too independent, and isn't she worried about how it makes him feel? He asks her, doesn't she care that, with the way she goes about socializing, and working, that she embarrasses him? That she dishonors him? She tries to be less, but it's never enough. It's as though he wants all of her to himself, but he also doesn't want her to exist at all.

He tells her that she owes him everything she has, that she is nothing without him, and he tells her these things everyday, he tells her these things even in silence, he tells her these things with just a sideways glance over the newspaper, or a twitch of his hand on the dinner table, he tells her who she can be, who she cannot be, what she can be, how, and when, and she believes him, and she fears him, and he kills her.

Her husband kills her.

She’s forty.

_“No use in rushing to a red light, Beverly.”_

All of them - all of the Losers, together again, in the cistern, but they're older. She's got a bird's eye view again, but it's not like before, outside of Neibolt. They all look like their parents in some way, or another, and they're holding hands, they're chanting, and there's visceral, animal fear in their hearts.

She's so petrified, she thinks she might die from the fear itself, but she doesn't recall that being a manner of death that neighbor boy ever mentioned.

Something cool touches her - it’s her lips. Something cool is touching her lips, and that’s good, because the eerie warmth of the Deadlights is fading in the wake of what’s _real_ , of what is touching her, pulling her down from the lights, from these visions. She feels the weight of her body touching the Earth again, and she's relieved.

Her eyes are open, she can feel that they are open, but they are unseeing at first - until she finds Ben standing before her, coming into focus, looking bashful, but glad, and his nose looks pink, and kind of cold too. Her lips tingle. He’s kissed her. 

With his hands clasping her face, and the shining in his hopeful eyes, she remembers the poem, suddenly - considering him in a way she hadn't before, she thinks of the poem about her hair, about a burning heart, and when she recites the first half, he completes it for her.

She wonders how she’d not seen something so lovely before, standing right in front of her. He’d been there all along, he's here now, offering his burning heart, and she’s warm again, but it’s good, coming from a magical sort of place, where Ben's heart, and her own can occupy the same space.

Richie throws his arms around both of them, exclaiming how much he loves them, and the rest of the Losers crowd them too before anymore can be said, or shared.

She forgets most of what she’s seen.


End file.
